Williams's Assists Need Help

Nets' Point Guard Closes In on 5,000 but Team's Style Has Hurt His Numbers

ENLARGE

Deron Williams is averaging just 7.7 assists per game this season, the lowest since his rookie season.
Associated Press

By

Alex Raskin

Feb. 5, 2013 8:31 p.m. ET

Deron Williams has been closing in on a statistical milestone. Closing in fast, though, would be an exaggeration.

Williams, the Nets' star point guard, was seven assists shy of 5,000 for his career entering Brooklyn's home game Tuesday night against the Los Angeles Lakers. Only 55 other NBA players have gotten there, and Williams is still four months away from his 29th birthday.

But the assists are slowing down.

At the beginning of Williams's career, when he was with the Utah Jazz, he was piling them up at a near-record pace. In March 2008, he became the first NBA player to get 212 assists in a month since Jazz legend John Stockton did it in January 1992. Williams crossed the 3,000-assist barrier in under 350 games, becoming just the 10th player in NBA history to do so.

Back then, he was a system point guard in a system built for point guards. "That system was a great system for my style of play," Williams said in December. "I'm a system player. I love coach [Jerry] Sloan's system. I loved the offense there."

Injuries slowed Williams's pace to 4,000 assists, but he still got there in February 2011. And then he was traded to the Nets.

Williams is playing on a winning team with current All-Star Brook Lopez and former All-Stars Joe Johnson and Gerald Wallace, but the success has come at the cost of his own statistics. He is averaging just 7.7 assists per game this season, his lowest mark since his rookie season. At that pace, Williams won't hit 6,000 assists until some time in the 2015-2016 season, when he is 31.

Williams averaged 12.8 assists per game in his first few months in New Jersey, but as the rebuilding process continued, then-coach Avery Johnson asked Williams to sacrifice his assists for points. He responded by averaging a career-high 21 points per game for a team that finished 22-44 in 2011-12. But Williams still finished fifth in the NBA with 8.7 assists per game, largely because he attracted so many double teams.

"A lot of his assists come from double teams, post-up positions," said interim coach P.J. Carlesimo, who was a Nets assistant until Avery Johnson was dismissed in December. "It makes him different than some other point guards."

While Williams and Carlesimo agree that he is still seeing plenty of double teams—which present the passing lanes he needs as a playmaker—the numbers suggest opposing defenses are being pulled in other directions. According to Synergy Sports, Williams has been left open on 61.4% of catch-and-shoot opportunities this year as opposed to just 50.6% last season. Naturally, Williams is more apt to shoot than pass if he is left open.

December didn't help, either. As the Nets were losing 11 of 16 games to close out 2012, their anemic offense effectively limited Williams to just 6.4 assists per game, whereas he averaged over eight assists per game in both November and January.

But the real culprits may actually be the pace with which the Nets play and the frequency with which Williams handles the ball.

The Nets rank dead last in the NBA in possessions per game (90.5), which is down slightly from a year ago, when they ranked 21st (92.7) out of 30 teams.

Naturally, fewer possessions means fewer chances for assists. Furthermore, Williams's "usage" rate—the percentage of a team's possessions that a player uses per 40 minutes—also has gone from a career-high 30.1% last season to 23.3% this year.

It sounds strange, but Williams has increased his assist rate—the percentage of his possessions that end with an assist—to 29.8% this season from 26.8% last season despite what his per-game averages reflect.

So if the "assist" statistic is complicated by all of these other factors, what is the real significance of Williams' reaching the 5,000-assist plateau?

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